This disclosure relates to maintaining corresponding relationships between chat transcripts and related chat content in an instant messaging system.
Instant messaging (IM) may be an important collaboration technique for real-time communication among users. IM may facilitate quick exchange of information like uniform resource locators (URLs) or file snippets, which may be difficult to exchange via traditional real-time communication tools such as telephones. It may be common for users to discuss something via IM based on specific content, such as a webpage or a local file like a document. For instance, a user may send a URL to other users, and then may chat with the other users for content corresponding to the URL. In another scenario, after sending a document to other users, a user may chat with the other users based on the document. Some present IM products, such as Lotus Sametime, may support viewing related content in an IM side window.
In an enterprise environment, several users may chat (real-time) on a topic and may wish to share their chat transcript with other users (e.g., team members) who may not have taken part in the real-time chat. To do this, they may have to copy the chat transcript and send it other users. If the chat is based on specific content (e.g., a file or URL), the user may describe the corresponding relationship between the chat transcript and related content. This may make it difficult to associate the chat transcript with the related content. For instance, during development of a software project, developers in different locations may review code through IM, and may tell other developers via IM which file and which line of code they are talking about. After chatting, the chat transcript may be stored separately from the program code, and the corresponding relationship between the program code and its related chat transcript may not be maintained. On the contrary, if related chat transcript may be maintained with program code, they may be conveniently referenced in future to understand factors which may have been considered during programming.
In a customer service environment, serving customers through IM, in call center for example, may be better than traditional call support in some specific areas. When a customer wants to get help from a call center through IM, he or she may send a URL or a screenshot of the problem to a specialist in the call center. The specialist may then tell the customer how to solve the problem. After a chat (e.g., via IM), the corresponding relationship between the problem content and the chat transcript may not be saved. In this circumstance, if another customer subsequently wants help with the same the problem, the specialist may have to input the answer or solution to the problem again. Although the specialist may search his chat transcript for the answer or solution to the problem, it may be not be easy for him to locate the wanted text in the transcript effectively. Instead, if the corresponding relationship between the problem content and the related chat transcript could be maintained, a specialist could look for the corresponding answer according to linkage stored previously if facing problems based on the same content. This may help the specialist respond to the problem sent by the customer more quickly. A specialist's performance may also be evaluated with the help of the corresponding relationship between the problem content and its related chat transcript, if maintained.
Present instant messaging communication and techniques may maintain only the chat transcript, and may not maintain the linkage between the transcript and the related content. Users often may need to search their entire chat transcript history to retrieve required information. Even if the corresponding chat transcript can be retrieved in this manner, it may be ineffective.